When She Drowned
by Colubrina
Summary: Desperate men shape Hermione Granger into a weapon and send her back in time to offer salvation to Tom Riddle or, failing that, to kill him. But tools that can think are dangerous and sometimes a sacrifice decides she's lost enough. COMPLETE
1. Chapter 1

**1.**

"If I could be killed," Tom Riddle said, "it would be for love of you."

* * *

**2\. **

"I sacrificed the world for you," Hermione Granger said.

"Regrets?" he asked, hand on the back of her neck. "Remorse?"

She leaned back against him as they looked out the window at the world they owned. "As long as I have you," she said at last, "the world can burn."

* * *

**3.**

They traveled. They traveled for years until Abraxas Malfoy went home and married a suitable girl and Thoros Nott went home and married a less suitable one and they were young and beautiful and strong and they watched the world age as they gathered power until it pooled out of them, until it sparked from their skin, until their very eyes glowed with it.

They never grew old.

And the Death Eaters formed and reformed and the Ministry was theirs and the school and if blood ran in the streets and fires raged it was nothing they had not expected.

Ruin.

Salvation.

Love.

Who could have predicted how closely entwined they would all be? Certainly not the men who'd sent her to him. They probably wouldn't have cared for the way the pair of them had interpreted 'salvation.' Of course, they were all dead now.

* * *

**4.**

She never liked the snakes. She'd roll her eyes at Tom and them and bury herself into a book and he'd tease her by wrapping one of the little ones around her arm.

The snakes liked her. "Warm," they'd say and fall asleep against her skin

* * *

**5\. **

Hermione would stare at him, sometimes, and roll the wand she'd taken from Dumbledore between her hands as if she were waiting for him to try to take it.

He kissed her on the temple once, very lightly, and whispered, "I trust you with it."

It was the first time he'd admitted he knew what it was.


	2. Chapter 2

**6.**

"We've burned the future," she said. "My knowledge of my past is no use anymore."

He grabbed her wrist, twisting her arm back. "Then what reason do I have not to kill you?"

He pushed at her mind expecting, as always, the wall of fire, and instead there was calm water and every thought was his to have and she loved him. "You know I can't be killed," she said softly.

* * *

**7.**

She owned him. She'd razed him to the ground like a field in spring and he had come forth with new growth and it was all for her. He feasted on her. He would do anything for her, go anywhere.

He might have even changed had she asked it of him.

She didn't.

Instead, she opened books of Dark Magic from the libraries of his lackeys and turned her brilliant mind to them and he, Hogwarts prodigy, did the same and they discovered things that had been lost, learned things that time had tried to wear away. The lackeys watched them, watched them come back from trysts in the fields with straw in her hair and blood on their hands, and they stopped asking if she were one of them. Stopped despising and started fearing.

"Why would they think any wife of yours would be weak?" she asked as his minions evaporated before her, water droplets hurried away into steam by her heat.

"Because they're fools," he said, dropping his mouth to her neck to lick a smear of blood off. "Because they can't see outside the neat walls of what they've been told is possible."

"Do you love me," he would ask. "Are you mine yet?"

"I have been drowned in you," was all she would say. "I have been made over by you into something new."

"I gave you choices," he said

Her fingers in his hair. "I took the choices. I chose you. I chose damnation and power."

"Self-aware tool," he murmured.

She shook her head, whimpering at the feel of his mouth at her throat. "I'll not be a knife in any hand but my own this time."

* * *

**8.**

"They told me you couldn't love," she said, sprawled across him on their bed. "They told me you were beautiful and brilliant and compelling, that men followed you like ducklings, the craven and the power hungry alike, but that I should never expect you to love. Not really. Get him to repent if you can and then the fire, they said. Or just the fire, of course."

"They do follow me," he said, a finger lazily circling round and round one of her nipples. "They're afraid and they're fascinated and they want the scraps of power that fall from my table and so they'd all follow me into hell and throw their own children into the maw to please me."

"I know," she said. "I saw them do it."

"I'll never repent, you know. In fact, it will be better with you," he said musingly. "I'll avoid the obvious mistakes."

"Did I ever tell you who was your main opponent?" she asked, sliding a hand across the alabaster perfection of him as she wet her lips.

He waited.

She touched her locket and he laughed with that cruel delight that made everyone but her shudder and turn away from him. "How could any man not love you," he breathed. "You are the light which draws me; you are the one who compels me; you are the flame to my moth."

"Have you been saved?" she asked. "Do you love now?"

"Only you," he said. "The world is filled shadows and ghosts to use and use up but you are solid and you are real and you are mine." He twisted underneath her and propped himself up onto an elbow. "Time to kill me now that I'm somewhat less damnable?" he asked. "Now that I love is it time for me to fall and burn in your inferno?"

"I should, I suppose," she said. "It was to be my whole life but you know that I won't."

"Because you love me?" he asked

She shook her head. "Because you love me. Because I'll be no one's sacrificial lamb. Because I am no hostage to a future we've already changed."

* * *

**9.**

Love is nothing but conflagration of the soul.

* * *

**10\. **

"Kill as many witches as you want," Hermione said. "Kill as many wizards. Burn our world to the ground; I'll light the match for you. But blood prejudice is beneath you."

"You know why I despise Muggles," he said. "Why I despise the Muggle-born who come from them."

"If you'd grown up with the Malfoys, you'd probably despise them," she said.

Tom smiled at her, ran his hands over her arms. "Probably," he admitted, "but I didn't." He asked again, "Do you plan to stop me?"

She didn't answer and he laughed. "I have you, pretty witch," he murmured in her ear. "Dark and powerful and damned and ruined and mine. If you've washed your hands in blood once, does it really matter whose you select for your next ablution?"


	3. Chapter 3

**11.**

"He's going to kill everyone like you," Mulciber Avery said to her. "He'll kill you eventually. You're a fool, for all that your magic is so powerful."

Hermione just looked at him. "Fire cooks your meat and burns your world. It's sweet that you think I'm the one at risk."

"Warning her off?" Tom asked, coming up behind her and resting his hands across her throat, "or just trying to rid me of my embarrassing Muggle-born problem."

Avery flushed.

"He thinks you might kill me," Hermione said. Tom laughed at that idea as she leaned her head back against him, imprisoned by his fingers, and watched Avery with a calm that made him shiver. "I believe he thinks I should run."

"If you ran," Tom said to her, "I'd follow you and tie you to me so tightly you could never leave again."

"Aren't you at all concerned?" Avery asked at the same time. "_Muggle_-born witch that you are."

"Tom and I have different views on some issues," Hermione conceded. "But I am, thanks to him, somewhat difficult to kill. Or tame."

**12\. **

His lackeys blanched at the engagement ring. "She's a _Mudblood_," Abraxas Malfoy hissed in disgust.

"We've already shredded the future," Hermione said, wand instantly at his throat. "I don't have any real problem shredding you too. I didn't especially care for your descendents."

"Do you want power?" Tom asked in his lazy, hypnotic voice, "or do you care about ideological purity? Because she burns with power, she sparks with power. She is fire and magic and, Abraxas, I'll let her play with you like a toy if you look at her the wrong way."

"What do we master first?" Thoros, ever pragmatic, asked.

"Blood magic," Hermione said, still leaning in to Malfoy. "Sacrifice. Before magic was standardized and put in neat boxes so children could learn it at school and be tested and wash the dishes it was rage and blood and pain." She tilted her head to the side. "It's still really rage and blood and pain but you can't give an exam on draining a man's blood and pouring it on the hillside to grow your crops from his life."

"Crops?" Malfoy asked with disdain, ignoring the wand.

"You think people developed magic to play exploding snap and have candy frogs that jump?" The look she gave him was filled with disgust. "Survival, Malfoy, that's why people used magic. That's where the raw power still is. Survival. At its core it's about food and warmth and sex."

"Sex?" Thoros eyed her with a partially hidden leer.

"I don't think you want to join Tom and I for sex magic," she said. "You wouldn't survive the experience."

"You might not survive looking at her that way," Tom said.

"She's not one of us," Malfoy said again.

"Oh, she is," Tom said.

"She's ruining you," the man said.

Tom shrugged. "From ruin comes change."

"We're changing the world," Hermione said. "We're changing the future."

**13.**

He'd burned for her. He burned for her. She would help him burn the world.

**14.**

They waited. She laid out things she knew from the future and Tom realized, now that he truly had her, that the only time she'd lied to him had been when she'd said she would.

"Let him defeat your rival," Hermione said and Tom had agreed. And then that battle was over and they found the man and they bound the man and Hermione disarmed him and burned him and, as he screamed, she said simply, "You shouldn't have taught me quite so well and expected me to stay leashed. You shouldn't have made me into your sacrifice and then let me wander free."

"She prefers having choices," Tom said, leaning up against a wall and watching as she worked the magic to split her soul. "She'll let herself be damned to have those choices."

"I am damned," she said, slipping Dumbledore's wand into a pocket with a dark smile and dangling the locket between her fingers. "I am, I suppose, ruined."

Tom wrapped his arms around her as the fire sputtered out on the cold stones of the dungeon behind them. "Have I done my job?" she asked as she tilted her head back to look at him. "Have I saved you?"

He laughed. "I cannot be saved," he said, lowering his mouth to her neck and grazing his teeth along her skin. "I am unsalvageable. I am unsalvaged. But, Hermione Granger, I am made whole by you, brought into a state of perfect grace."

She pressed the elder wood wand to his side. "Do I kill you, then?" she whispered even as he thrust his fingers against her, into her, and made her his again.

"I cannot be killed," he whispered as she held her wand against him and shuddered at his touch. "The world is ours, ripe and rotted and waiting for us to burn it and cleanse it and own it and do with it as we will."

**15.**

"You have to live forever," he said. "You have to cheat death with me."

"A horcrux." She said the word as though she were tasting it, rolling it around her mouth.

He watched her through his lashes.

"Who?" she said at last and he smiled, that cold, charming smile that fooled every professor, the one that people were drawn to even as they knew he was going to devour them.

"How about Dumbledore?" he asked. "How about one of the men who would have made you into nothing but an extension of their will?"


	4. Chapter 4

**16.**

He argued with her about Muggles. She told him he was ignorant. He suggested she come see where he grew up. She said that a few loathsome individuals should not condemn an entire people.

"They're filth," he said. "Vermin."

"What am I?" she asked.

"Mine," he said but she shook her head and batted his hand away.

"Muggles have never hurt me," she said. "It's wizards and witches who took my life, cut it away from me and used it for their own purposes."

"Also gave you power," he said.

"The power was always mine."

She always disagreed with him. He boiled with fury that she'd dare to contradict him then come back to debate with her more. He argued with her when he had her shoved against walls, pressing himself into her. He argued with her over toast. He argued with her as she pulled books from the Restricted Section in the library and made notes on spells so dark that pools of rank, oily magic dripped out of the very parchment and collected in puddles at her feet.

"_Modifying_ _Sacrificial Power_?" he asked, touching one of her reading choices.

"The thing being sacrificed can take all the power of that ritual into herself," she said, finger moving over the words.

"How?" he asked, perching on the arm of her chair and reading over her shoulder.

"Essentially by taking back her consent," she said, voice low in the dim corner of the library. "It's discussed more in the light of ensuring your willing sacrifice doesn't change her mind, generally by simply killing her early in the process, but –"

"But self-aware tools are more problematic," he said. "How powerful do you want to be, Hermione?"

She leaned her head up against him and he rested a hand on her.

"What does it mean to be ruined," she mused. "What does it mean to prevent ruination? How many choices do we really have, anyway? If I pull you off the board, does another would-be king appear?"

He dug his fingers into her shoulder. "Don't wiggle out of it that way," he said. "Don't be such a coward and tell yourself another would-be Dark Lord would just fall into my place. Be mine with your eyes open to the darkness. Be mine because you want the power. Be mine because you burn, Hermione. Be mine because you're fire. Be mine because you aren't afraid."

She shrugged and closed the book.

"You aren't going to do it?" he asked, disappointed.

She tilted her head to look up at him. "I already did."

**17.**

She burned so brightly.

If he couldn't extinguish her, he had to own her.

**18.**

"No one is allowed to touch what is mine."

"I wasn't at the time."

"Are you now?"

Are you now?

Are you

now

you

are

**19.**

"What do we do now?" he asked her. She was buttoning up her blouse. She was glamouring away the marks he'd left. She was tucking her hair back into a bun. She wasn't answering him. "Is now when you kill me?" he continued. "The diary's in the top drawer."

She cocked her head to the side and looked at him through the mirror. "Is this a confession of love, Tom? Have I saved you?"

He reached a hand out to run it along the curve of her spine. "Hardly," he said with a snort. "You won't, you know."

"Save you?" she asked, still putting her hair back up. "Hope springs eternal and all that." After she'd jabbed the last pin back into her hair she turned to look at him and he left his fingers pressed lightly against her abdomen. "I enjoy the trying more than I'd thought to. Why change anything?"

"Because belonging to you is untenable unless I own you as well. Because you're going to try to stop me."

She shrugged. "Maybe."

"Maybe?" His voice mocked her. "I'm the evil monster. I'm ruin and death and the end of everything you care about. Slaughter me now, little Mudblood of mine, and be the heroine."

"Or not." She regarded him. "You're brilliant, you know. I rather like that about you."

He licked his lips. "I have noticed that, yes."

"You lack a conscience, of course, and you like hurting people."

"I like controlling people," he corrected, hand still on her. "I like power: political, social, magical. And I have not hurt you."

"Not yet, no," she said. "You will. You have."

"She'll die the moment I find her," Tom said as Hermione's hand fluttered to the scar on her arm. "No one is allowed to touch what is mine."

"I wasn't at the time."

"Are you now?"

She laughed. "Well, I'm certainly not wholly Dumbledore's anymore."

He pulled her to him as he sat on the bed. He settled his hands on her hips and looked up at her. "Take the world with me. I can give it to you and make you its queen so long as you belong to me first."

Her fingers in his hair.

"You're doing it wrong," she said. "You're supposed to take me to a mountain top when you show me all the wealth and glory of the world and offer it up to me."

"You aren't exactly a Christ-figure, Hermione."

"No," she agreed. "That was Harry."

Tom Riddle nodded. Harry Potter, she'd told him, stretched on one day in the grass, had been the first child turned into a weapon pointed at him, designed as a sacrifice. Had been his point of weakness. Had still not succeeded. "We turned time back over and over," she'd said. "Made him fight that last battle again and again and he died every time. Sometimes everyone died. Sometimes he didn't even rise from the first killing curse."

She, of course, was the second child turned into a weapon and pointed at him.

"People always want to live," she'd said. "They'd rather live with salvation but they'll take without, and so here I am, their tool and sacrifice in one."

"Would you rather live without salvation?" he asked.

She looked at him. "Yes," she admitted.

**20.**

He ran his hands over the word carved into her arm. It had either been done with a cursed blade or she'd opted not to heal it properly. The lines were crude and brutal, the scar tissue twisted.

"Who?" he asked.

"Your most devoted follower," she said, watching his face. "She did it to please you."

"I'll kill her," he said. "Tell me her name and when she comes to join me I'll flay the flesh from her bones and drink her marrow while she begs for mercy in vain."

He kept his eyes on the scar and waited for her. Waited for her to pass his test. Waited for her to take one more step toward him.

"Bellatrix Lestrange," she said at last. "Her maiden name was Black."

He pressed himself into her, thrust his tongue between the lips she parted for him, bit at her, consumed her.

Drowned her.


	5. Chapter 5

**21\. **

He had her in every way a man could have a woman. Hands, tongue, cock everywhere and anywhere and she writhed beneath him and shuddered and whimpered and called out his name and she was his and he owned her and he was hers.

He was hers.

She devoured him and burned him and he lay himself out before her to be so consumed and he shook at the touch of her hands and trembled at the feel of her mouth and thrust into her and begged and gasped her name and he was hers and she owned him and she was his.

She was his.

**22.**

Lust was for drowning. He was holding her under until she couldn't breathe and she wasn't even fighting him.

**23.**

"Keep me," he said.

**24.**

He could kiss her for hours. He held her up against walls, thrust her against his mattress, clawed his fingers into her hair. She pushed back, her mouth wild against his, and he'd leave her, her lips swollen and red marks peppering her neck, only to come back and see she'd glamoured all traces of his ownership away.

"Mine," he'd snarl against her skin in his bed. "Mine," he'd whisper in her ear as he held out a chair. "Mine," he'd say, running his hands over her arms.

She never objected to his endless claims of ownership but never quite acceded to them either. Only once, once when he had her pinned beneath him and was inhaling the scent of the hair he'd tugged loose, did she say anything about it at all. She'd tangled her own hands in his dark hair and pulled his ear to her lips. "Mine," she'd said. "You're mine, Tom Riddle. Now what am I going to do with you?"

"What do you want to do?" he'd asked.

"Ruin you," she'd whispered. "Melt you. Own you. Keep you."

"I am yours to destroy," he'd said, holding her hair so tightly in his fists he'd known it had to hurt her.

"You should kill me," she'd said, "before I do."

"I can't," he'd admitted. "You should be the good girl they sent to the past and kill me."

"I'm not that girl anymore," she'd said.

**25.**

He ran a hand along her clothed shoulder and heard her intake of breath. She sat at the table in the library, his hand on her shoulder, and very slowly he slipped his fingers until he had them at her throat, resting on her skin.

He could feel her nearly panicked swallowing.

Her lips had opened and she watched him, her breath hitching.

"You belong to me," he said.

She closed her eyes.


	6. Chapter 6

**26.**

He itched to touch her. He wanted to feel her skin under his hands. He wanted to pull her hair out of the hideous braids and buns and twists and bury his face in it. The heat of her hand though the sleeve of his shirt as he walked her through the halls with courtesy and dignified grace burned him.

She was fire and he was her fuel and she was consuming him.

He questioned her about the future, long hours spent lying on the ground with her dark books spread around her. "I'll answer all your questions," she'd say. "But sometimes I'll lie."

He'd push against her mind but it didn't matter.

"They did teach me occlumency," she said with laughter at his failure. "Your mental agility is not unknown to your enemies, Tom."

He looked for tells but never saw any. Either she was utterly truthful or a brilliant liar.

He hated that he couldn't be sure.

He sat and questioned her and didn't touch her and went back to his room and lay in the dark and opened and closed his fists in rage and frustration. She was a knife pointed at his heart and, even knowing she'd been designed to intrigue him, he couldn't let her go.

**27.**

"Are you still Dumbledore's tool?" he whispered.

**28.**

He turned her into his girlfriend by dint of implying she was too afraid. Her eyes flashed and she was his, though the mocking laughter she poured onto him made him wonder who was playing whom. "Be careful," she'd say. "As soon as you love me, I may decide to do what my maker wanted and slaughter you."

"You assume I am capable of love," he said. "You assume I would ever love you."

He held her chair and carried her books and escorted her to Hogsmeade and never let his fingers brush against her filthy, Mudblood skin. He'd offer her his arm but never his hand. He'd brush his lips an inch from her cheek but never make contact.

"You're a terrible liar," she said.

"You'd prefer I ravish you?" he asked, eyebrows arched. "Paw you? Slobber on you?"

"I'd prefer you loathsome and despicable," she said. "I'd prefer you stupid and brutish. I'd prefer you long ago and far away. They warned me but I tied myself to the mast anyway."

"Who listens to warnings?" he asked.

"No one," she admitted. "Sing your siren song, Tom Riddle, and we all jump into the water and drown just hoping to get closer to you."

"Am I drowning you, Hermione Granger?" he asked, leaning so close to her ear he could feel the heat of her skin on his lips. "Do you fall?"

She didn't move. Finally she said, "If you were honest, I would drown in you, yes."

**29.**

She was a resource, he told himself. She'd taught him water. She'd taught him fire. She would now teach him time. He would learn from her how he went so wrong the future sent a woman back to kill him. How many resources, he wondered, had been poured into her. Time was bent for me, she'd said. I was turned into a tool, she'd said. She was, he suspected, someone's last great hope that he could be turned aside.

She was salvation in the form of love and death and heat and flame.

She was meant to be the salvation of her own time.

His salvation.

She was ruin.

She was ruining him and he couldn't look away.

**30.**

I won't _ruin_ it, he argued with her. I'm going to rule it. I'm going to make it mine. I'm going to purify it.


	7. Chapter 7

**31\. **

They didn't touch as they walked down to the village. "Teach me," he said.

He ordered.

"Teach me the things you know, the magic you have."

"I have," she said calmly. "The bulk of what I know – what I was trained to do – was the elemental work. The rest is trivial. I needed – need - fire to destroy your horcruxes. Anything else was deemed… unnecessary."

"I don't have a reason to keep you alive, then," he said.

She stopped and put her hand on his chest. "You really don't," she agreed.

"You belong to me," he said, feeling the heat of her hand and waiting for it to grow so bad he'd have to step away. Waiting for her to burn him again.

"I was sent back for you," she said, "so I think one could just as easily argue that you belong to me. My project. My task. You, Tom Riddle, are indeed mine."

"Your task to kill," he said.

"Or save." She cocked her head to the side. "Dumbledore is, as you surely know, a big fan of the power of love. He'd not think you properly salvaged if you died without knowing love. I think," she said somewhat musingly, pulling her hand back so only one finger remained on him, "I think I am supposed to make you love me and then, when you have softened enough to be weak, to be saved, then I should burn you alive."

"It might have been easier to go with the first option," he said.

"Sometimes," she continued as if he hadn't spoken, "it seems like it might be a shame to ruin your cold perfection with love."

"I succeed, don't I?" he asked. "That's why they sent you back to kill me."

"Oh yes," she said. "You ruin the world."

**32.**

He crossed the Hall to stand at her dining table as if he were a perfect gentleman and asked if she'd accompany him to Hogsmeade. The other girls at the table looked at him, nerves at his presence warring with jealousy he was singling their Housemate out.

He was, he knew, considered both terrifying and desirable. Frightening and dangerous and alluring and on his way to greatness.

Hermione, however, didn't even look up from her book. She just said, "Saturday?"

"Yes," he said, charm and sincerity and charisma covering how irritated he was that she wasn't leaping at this offer. Whatever else she might be, she was also a filthy, friendless Mudblood and he was the school's star pupil and Head Boy.

"If we must," she said, still not looking up. "I'll meet you at the main door after breakfast."

**33.**

One day she wasn't wearing the shapeless jumper with her initial knit into it. Her shoes were just as ugly, her hair just as badly tended, so he knew it wasn't a foray into feminine vanity. He'd long since realized she wasn't quite as dumpy as she'd seemed with that thing on. It was still startling to see her in a neat skirt and a fitted blouse.

It was still startling to realize he wanted her.

"If your goal is to attract a boyfriend," he said as cruelly as he could, "you're going to have to do more than just lose the hideous jumper."

"I'm putting things away," she said. "It's a new season. A new time."

"Making choices, are you?" he asked.

**34.**

"I should kill you," he said.

She shrugged.

**35.**

He stood in the lake, soaked, clothes clinging to him and hair matted while she sat and held a twig that burned and burned and was not consumed.

"I was given a story to read," she said, "before I was sent here. It was about an angel who would seek out mortals in a state of perfect grace and murder them so they could achieve eternal salvation."

He dripped and listened.

"Would you like that kind of salvation, Tom? Death now to prevent decay and destruction later?"

He pulled his wand and leveled it at her. "What makes you think you could kill me?" he asked.

"What makes you think I couldn't?"

He lunged towards her, knees on the ground and his wand almost instantly jammed into her neck. She had hers shoved under his ribs. "Mutually assured destruction," she said softly. "Do you want to die today?"

"Except I can't be killed, Hermione," he said. "Try and you'll find out."

She took a finger and placed it on his ring. "How many horcruxes, Tom?" she asked. "How many times have you already split your soul?"

He stiffened as she ran her finger around and around the stone on his ring but he forbore to ask how she knew. She knew. That was all that mattered. "Two," he said.

"I bet you keep the diary in your bedside table," she said so very softly. "I bet I could destroy it, and you, before you could stop me. In the future we went after the horcruxes first and the man second, but I suspect I could kill your body first and your horcruxes second and it would be just as effective."

"Horcruxes, Hermione, are harder to destroy than you might think," he said, wand still at her throat.

She laughed at him, again. Always with the laughter, this witch. "The trick is the finding; destruction is easy. Basilisk venom," she said, her eyes never wavering from his. "Fiendfyre."

He could see the smirk in her eyes when she saw him understand. Fire. What he didn't expect was for her to shrug, resheathe her wand, and shove his own away with an impatient gesture before she lay back and looked up at the sky.

"Are you suicidal?" he asked curiously as he squatted back on his heels and looked at her.

She lifted her head and looked at him for a moment before putting it back down. "Not sure," she admitted. "It would simplify things to be dead. No more decisions. No more choices. I would just be a failed strategy." There was another long pause during which he put away his own wand and sat next to her.

"Were you supposed to have a choice?" he asked at last.

"Self-aware tools can be problematic," she said, her tone wry.

"Do you want a choice?"

"You're still alive, aren't you?"


	8. Chapter 8

**36.**

She had been right that fire did not come easily to him. He was a creature of shadow and depth and fluid. The water loved him, the water sang to him, the water sucked the air from his lungs and he closed his eyes and gloried in it.

Fire sputtered and struggled and sparked but never roared.

She'd sit there on the shore and watch him, alternately amused and guarded and impressed.

"How did you learn this," he demanded at last. She was no older than he and she knew things, things no one at Hogwarts talked about.

"Time was bent for me," was all she'd say. "It gave me time to study. Time to be made into a tool."

"Why show me?"

She was silent for a long time when he asked that. "You're capable of doing it," she said at last. "It's nice to have an equal who isn't molding me like clay."

**37.**

"What do you want with her?"

It was a demand and Tom Riddle didn't allow people to demand things. Not of him. He demanded, always.

He looked at Abraxas Malfoy with contempt. "Does it matter?"

Malfoy narrowed his eyes and the two of them locked gazes for a heartbeat, then two, then three and then the blond looked away.

"I suppose it doesn't," Malfoy said. "You always get what you want."

"We're going to take the world," Tom said, voice hypnotic. "Power will shine from us like stars and they'll all be blinded by…by our fire."

"Why her?" Malfoy asked again.

"Because she burns, Abraxas."

"She's filthy," the man muttered but Tom Riddle shook his head. "She's so pure the fire itself cannot burn her," he murmured. "The very flames cast her back into my hands."

"Mudblood," his lackey hissed.

"Mine," Tom said.

**38.**

Whatever she wanted, it wasn't forced truth, ripped from the brilliant mind he couldn't reach.

**39.**

"Why are you doing this?" Tom Riddle asked her, reading her Potions essay over her shoulder.

"It's an assignment," she said.

"You've said nothing for two feet," he said. "You've employed an elaborate chiasmus structure but said nothing. I watched you brew this potion perfectly yesterday, look at it, and then add peppermint."

She rolled up the completed essay. "I like peppermint," she said. "It gives things a nice smell."

"It ruined your potion," pointed out.

"Ruin depends upon your point of view," she said. "Why do you assume my goal is to have Slughorn praise how clever I am?"

"What is this goal of yours?" he said, polite and charming tone covering both his habitual contempt and genuine interest. What she wanted – what she was doing here in his time – was an endless question. Not, he suspected, quite what she'd been sent here to do.

"Deciding what it means to be ruined, of course," she said.

"To reduce to a state of decay. To ravage. To destroy," he said. "To burn to the ground."

She packed up her bag, stood up, and looked at him. "Maybe. Maybe where one person sees ruination another sees change. When lightning strikes and the prairies burn is the land ruined or prepared for new life? When the river floods, is the land drowned or enriched?"

"Your potion was still, dare I say it, ruined," he said.

"If what I'd wanted was a batch of veritaserum, yes," she agreed as she turned away, dismissing him again.

"What did you want?" he asked but she was already gone.

**40.**

She taught him. His Mudblood, her hands filthy in the mud by the lake, forced him to focus his mind.

"Wandless," she said. "Voiceless. Like occlumency except you push your own energy outward instead of using it to form a wall."

He learned. His followers followed. They hovered. They worried and fretted and shuffled their feet. He hated Mudbloods, Thoros finally said. "You hate them. Why are you spending all your time with that whore?"

"Call her that again and I'll rip your throat out," Tom Riddle said.

"She's _nothing_," Malfoy said.

"She's fire," Tom Riddle corrected him.

She was his fire and she was burning him and he longed to extinguish her.


	9. Chapter 9

**41.**

"Water extinguishes fire," he said.

She shrugged. "Or fire makes water evaporate and disappear."

**42.**

He didn't kill her.

He didn't say anything of import while they walked to the lake. Didn't ask her any real questions. He studied her body beneath the lumpy jumper she almost always wore, the one with a big H knitted into it, and considered what she'd look like in better clothes.

He walked with her.

She talked but the words were vacuous. He understood, intuitively, that she was doing little more than reciting conversational banalities while she watched him. She was coming to a decision.

He wondered if she'd chosen fire to hurt him because he ignited her as much as she made him an inferno.

At last, at the water's edge, he bent down and lay the hand she'd scalded across the surface, just breaking the tension and disturbing a water bug that skittered away, afraid of them both.

She dropped her bag and squatted down next to him. At his side. When she put her hand next to his, he watched as the water begin to hiss and steam. "Do you want to know how?" she asked. "I suspect it won't come easily to you. You, I think, are not fire."

"What am I," he asked, watching the curls of vapor rise into the air.

"Water, probably," she said. "I could drown in you."

**43\. **

"Stop staring at me."

Tom Riddle looked up at the Mudblood – he'd started to think of her as _his_ Mudblood – and schooled his features into a politely inquiring expression. "I beg your pardon?" he asked. She'd come over to the Slytherin table at the end of lunch, her horrible hair pulled back into a tight braid that was possibly the least flattering way he'd seen her wear it yet. She had her bag pulled up onto one shoulder and was wearing the kind of practical, comfortable, unattractive shoes all the other girls gave up as soon as puberty hit.

"You stare at me," she said. "All the time. In class. In the halls. At meals. Stop."

His friends – his _lackeys_ – were staring at her now with a kind of fascinated horror.

"I don't mean to be rude, Hermione," he said, "it _is_ Hermione, right? But how do you plan to stop me? I'll look at you if I like."

He expected her to stomp off in a huff but instead she tilted her head to the side, as if really considering him for the first time. "You're a menace," she said at last, "but you're more interesting than I expected. Walk me to the lake."

Thoros Nott almost choked on the lunch he was still eating. Tom, however, just stood and offered the Mudblood his arm while ignoring Malfoy's disgusted grimace. She hesitated long enough for him to smirk at her, enjoying how she didn't want to touch him. She might not be afraid, not the way the rest of the idiot students were, but she was wary.

Wary wasn't perfect but he'd take it.

She saw his smirk and immediately placed her hand on his arm. Her weakness, then, he thought. She hated to be considered cowardly. That was how to manipulate her. This one he couldn't intimidate but, oh, he could still make her dance to his tune.

As he led her out of the hall with manners he'd had to learn from books he overheard Abraxas say, "Do you think he's going to kill her?"

**44.**

He had Abraxas Malfoy get a book on the Dark Arts from his family library. _Incantations on Immortality._ He gave it to her in the hallway.

"Given what you read I thought you might like this," he said.

She read the title and laughed until he thought she might be sick.

**45\. **

He watched her. He watched her all bloody day. He wanted to know how she'd done that. How she'd made him burn.

How she was making him burn.

She ate silently, a book propped up in front of her. She wrote essays that, based on the one he'd casually stolen from Slughorn's desk, managed to say very little in as many words as possible. She had a thing for nested subordinate clauses that, he realized with disgust, amused him. She was toying with professors by using the most convoluted grammatical structures to say nothing.

He appreciated the art of playing with people.

"Salvation," he said to her in the hall. "I understand it's like water flowing over the souls of the damned or some such."

"Hand hurt?" she asked. He narrowed his eyes. "I hope so," she added.

"Bitch," he murmured, angry and amused and interested against his will.

"Salvation," she said, her tone mocking. "Since you asked. Deliverance from ruin. A man once thought I could deliver you from your own ruin." She hoisted her bag up onto her shoulder.

"Dumbledore," he said.

"He's a fool," she said and, for once, Tom Riddle agreed with her.

"What do you mean, my ruin?" he asked but she'd already walked away from him.

She was always doing that. Always walking away.

He was always burning, watching her.


	10. Chapter 10

**46.**

"Tell me about salvation," Tom said.

The Mudblood looked up at him. "There are dictionaries in the library," she said.

He settled next to her. She'd spread a small blanket out over the lawn and had books laid out around her. She was, he'd noticed, never without books, and what books they were. He picked up one now. _History of Blood Magic._

She sat in class and never volunteered an answer, never called attention to herself. Her marks were determinedly average. He never say her laughing with girlfriends or flirting with boys. She was a dowdy, dumpy, average bit of filth with no friends and no accomplishments and she read the most advanced books he'd ever seen a student read.

The darkest books, if truth be told. Not that he was ever that interested in truth.

"Do you even understand this?" he asked, flipping through the pages.

"It's basic but it's good background information," she said, her voice flat. She reached to him and went to pluck the book out of his fingers but the moment her hand was in reach he dropped the book and grabbed her wrist.

Physical contact made legilimancy easier.

It didn't matter. He still couldn't broach her mind.

"If you do not let go of me right now – " she began and he laughed.

"You'll do what?" he said, squeezing his hand more tightly around her thin wrist. "Scream? Do you think anyone will come to your rescue? You're sitting with me. They'll all turn away and hope I don't decide to sit with them next."

She laughed back at him. Actually laughed and he fumed at her lack of fear until he realized his hand was starting to burn. Holding her was like pressing his hand against an iron and he gasped and let her go, and, looking down at his palm, looked for the blisters he was sure must be there.

"I told you not to touch me," was all she said.

**47\. **

He watched her in the library. She'd pulled advanced books off the shelf and was reading with obvious pleasure. She made little noises when she came to a passage that interested her and made quick, neat notes in some bound parchment in front of her on the table. When she left he picked her books off the cart where she'd left them.

_Advanced Occlumentic Techniques_.

_Safe Methods for Incorporating Elemental Forces_

_Sacrificial Rites and Carnality_

He set the books back down and gazed thoughtfully at the door she'd exited through.

**48.**

He shoved her bag out of his way with a contemptuous kick.

"Don't touch my things." Her voice was low and furious and he looked at her filthy, Mudblood face in surprise. People didn't cross him. They simply didn't. Teachers – fools that they were – saw the polite, brilliant boy. He was their prodigy, considered all the more remarkable because he was an orphan. Students, however, knew to stay out of his way.

People who crossed him got _hurt_.

People who made him angry got very hurt indeed.

None of them ever spoke of it to anyone, of course. He burned terror into their brains even as he made their nerves scream and not a single one of his victims ever spoke about what he did to them.

The other students knew anyway.

This stupid Mudblood, however, didn't seem to know any better. He smiled at her, almost excited to be able to correct her misunderstanding about her place in his world. It had been a long time since anyone had dared to even look at him the wrong way. The girl sharing a desk with his newest victim edged away and shrank down into herself as if, by making herself as small as possible, she might escape his notice.

"Don't even think about it," the Mudblood said. "Touch me and you'll wish you hadn't. Touch my things again and you'll wish you hadn't."

"I'm not sure we've been properly introduced," he said, holding out his hand. "I'm Tom Riddle."

"I know who you are," she said with contempt evident in her tone, not taking his hand. "Voldemort. Would-be Dark Lord."

He reached out toward her mind and found a wall of solid loathing.

"Dumbledore was clearly touched when he came up with this little project," she said and Tom wondered whether the emotion that walled her mind off was for him or the Transfiguration professor. "You're already a monster. There's nothing to save."

He dropped the hand she'd refused to touch and narrowed his eyes. "Salvation?" he asked. "Did someone add a Theology elective to the curriculum and not tell me?" His tone was mocking. "I'd love to learn all about salvation."

She snorted.

Tom looked at the cowering girl next to her then back at the bushy-haired problem. She'd already dismissed him and was skimming her notes, highlighting a question she had about the subject with her quill. She'd _dismissed_ him. No one, and he meant no one, was allowed to do that. He ended conversations when he was done and not before. "I'm sorry I kicked your bag," he said, trying to force her attention back to him.

She didn't even look up. "Your lying skills need work," she said. "Go away, Tom Riddle."

**49.**

He hated her. That fucking _filthy_, disgusting Mudblood. Raised by Muggles, a life spent wallowing in dirt and disease. They all needed to be wiped out like the vermin they were. People talked about compassion but no one has compassion for the flea when the Black Death breathes down their necks.

She was that flea. She carried pestilence in her very being, in her blood. She and all her ilk needed to die before she – before they - could spread their rot. She needed to be burned away, like rotting flesh.

That her magic was so powerful she'd traveled here from the future just made her that much more of an abomination.

He hated her.

**50.**

She stepped into the portal armed with knowledge and fire, shaped by desperate men to reshape the world.

She was their Hail Mary.


End file.
